A little while back I wrote about simple application deployment using Rackspace Cloud.  One of the things about running your own servers (as opposed to running in a managed/hosted environment) is that it's down to you to monitor the health of your servers.

Depending on your uptime requirements, complexity of app, etc., your monitoring could be as simple as a script that regularly pings your app server to make sure it's still alive, through to running a comprehensive infrastructure monitoring suite (such as Nagios).  If you're bootstrapping an app, your needs will likely be somewhere in the middle.

One of the benefits of running on a cloud service such as EC2 or Rackspace Cloud is that these platforms provide an API for third-party support software to integrate with your cloud.  Server monitoring is an excellent use-case for this kind of integration, so it's no surprise to see a number of monitoring service providers have sprung up in recent months.

For cost and ease of use, I really like Cloudkick.  They support a number of popular cloud providers, such as EC2, Gogrid, Linode, Slicehost, Rackspace, Rimuhosting, VPS.net and SoftLayer. So, the chances are you can get seamless integration out-of-the-box.  If you're running a server outwith one of these providers, Cloudkick have a piece of software called "Cloudkick Agent", which you can install on your server to get it talking to Cloudkick.

Cloudkick offer a number of pricing plans, ranging from free to $600/month.  The free offering gets you HTTP/HTTPS/SSH monitoring with failure/recovery notifications sent by email, and so is perfect if you just need to be notified if your app server falls over or becomes unreachable.  The paid plans offer SMS notification as well as CPU/disk/memory/bandwidth monitoring of your server instances.  The cheapest SMS-enabled plan is $100/month.

Set-up is extremely quick and painless; I had my Rackspace Cloud instances set up for monitoring in under 5 minutes, including email notifications and some fancy charts showing network latency from the Cloudkick servers across the US.

It's an oldie, but a goodie: I just watched this TED talk by Seth Godin, and feel it's worth posting here.  It's a great reminder that you don't have to be good, you just have to be remarkable.  I think this rings very true in the world of tech startups.  To be successful, your product doesn't necessarily have to be the best out there, but it does need the kind of momentum it would get from being remarkable.